If You Could Get In Your Car...

...and drive straight UP at about 77,600 MILES PER HOUR (My car only goes this fast on the way home if I have hot food in the car) for 20 days or so, then turn around and take a picture, this is what you'd see:



Earth & Moon Portrait -
First Photo transmitted from Jupiter Bound Juno
This image of Earth (on the left) and the moon (on the right) was taken by NASA's Juno spacecraft on Aug. 26, 2011, when the spacecraft was about 6 million miles (9.66 million kilometers) away. It was taken by the spacecraft's onboard camera, JunoCam. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech



Long time blog readers will know of my reverence for Carl Sagan's impassioned Pale Blue Dot speech, which he wrote in reaction to a similar image of our little planet, suspended in a filament of light that was taken by one of the Voyager spacecraft. I think this image is as important and while I am no scientist or philosopher, I do have some thoughts of my own on it.



Consider these two pinpoints of light. The slightly larger one is us. All of us. Everyone alive right now lives somewhere on that tiny speck of light. Hurricanes, earthquakes, wars and plagues rage violently across its surface. Individuals, families, tribes and countries live and die here every day, but to the universe our home shows only a peaceful glint of pale blue light. Had the spacecraft that imaged this picture turned its lens a few degrees left, right, up or down, our entire existence would literally be out of the picture.

A few degrees.

To us, the world is a huge, all-encompassing place and it comprises everything we are, everything we know, everything we love, everything we hate, everything we ever hope to achieve. Yet viewed from the outside, the Earth is tiny, insignificant, hopelessly lost in the background of the universe. Here we sit, on our speck, supposing ourselves important.

The smaller light is our tiny moon and the distance between the two represents the farthest that mankind has ever travelled. We think of those journeys as milestones in human history, even though a viewer from outside our solar system would categorise our monumental odyssey to the moon as nothing more than a local sightseeing trip. As the universe reckons these things, humanity has had less impact upon its stage than a flea travelling on the back of an elephant has affected all of our planet's history.

So, rejoice in the knowledge that no matter the crisis, no matter the celebration, we live snug on our little mote of light, orbited by an even smaller jot of light, floating in a vast cosmic ocean of planets, stars and other more wondrous objects and events, all of which will continue to dwarf us and our progeny for the next several billion years. Our tiny pinpoints of light are all we have and likely all we'll ever get. Given how well we humans have managed our resources and ourselves thus far, one can imagine that the universe might judge that it is probably just as well that we are so marooned on our tiny, dim archipelago.

Our islands of light are so small, so fragile and we are totally dependent upon them for our survival. It is good to see them for what they really are once in a while.